“I’m the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life. It’s awful. If I’m on my way to the store to buy a magazine, even, and somebody asks where I’m going, I’m liable to say I’m going to the opera. It’s terrible.”

Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye

Rob Ford is no angry, angst-ridden teenager trying to figure out how to grow up. But he is a classic case of arrested development.

This Baby Huey of a mayor hangs with young gang-bangers. He pantomimes guzzling booze and driving at a city council meeting. He potty-talks about getting all the “pu--y” he needs at home. He gets foul-mouthed blotto at Leaf games. He is fingered for allegedly feeling up a woman’s backside at a function. He’s asked to leave a glittery charity ball for eyebrow-raising conduct. He uses his office for alcohol-drenched partying. He smokes crack with hoods half his age. And when repeatedly winkled out for lying, he summons a childish sorry-sorry-sorry.

With each new revelation in The Chronicles of Rob Ford, the mayor’s behaviour veers ever more ridiculously towards the sophomoric.

Yet no charges. And no convincing explanation from Chief Bill Blair for no charges.

This is where the saga stalls mystifyingly.

Numerous wiretaps authorized for phones belonging to unsavoury characters of Somali descent orbiting around the mayor apparently but not a one obtained — presumably never requested by Project Brazen 2 police investigators — for either Ford or his go-to button-man Sandro Lisi. Why not?

Ford and Lisi seem to have been deliberately left out of the listen-in loop. That makes no sense when each popped up repeatedly on the investigative radar and when visual surveillance was conducted against Lisi. In such an exhaustive probe, where the information to obtain (ITO) police documents in support of a search warrant runs to 500 pages, that glaring omission reeks.

When Blair put the detective he described as his top investigator on the Project Brazen case, it becomes even more incredulous that so exacting a cop would have left such a big hole in the investigation. The obvious conclusion is that he was told not to go there. No other interpretation holds water.

Of course, police did not include all their wiretaps in the Lisi search warrant application. The charges of extortion laid against him in October refer to calls Lisi made on May 16-18. So police must know what was discussed in those conversations, yet the summary of the wiretap (the inference that they arose from intercepts obtained from the other party’s phone) is not contained in the material that media lawyers successful fought to obtain.

Selective filing of documents also stokes suspicion about police avowals that the murder of 21-year-old Anthony Smith in March — a gang member earlier photographed with Ford and two other individuals outside the 15 Windsor Rd. crack house — had nothing whatsoever to do with manoeuvring among thugs over the notorious crack video. The police documents, which contain allegations that have not been proven in court, flatly state Smith getting shot in the head was not related to the video and probably arose as payback over a robbery among drug fellow-travellers.

Ford’s longtime friend David Price, however — who lost his job as logistics director in the gutting of the mayor’s office staff two weeks ago — told Ford’s then-chief of staff that the cellphone which contained the crack recording belonged to Smith and that it was the motive for the murder. Price repeated the claim of video as motive for murder when he was interviewed by police at 23 Division on May 18.

Police documents state: “This theory is not correct based on previous interceptions relevant to the murder of Smith.”

In the absence of any more details provided, doubts about police assurance on this matter take hold.

Ford just continues to bluster and barrelhouse his way through the escalating scandal.

On the morning after we discovered the mayor may have tried to stave off blackmail over that crack video, RoFo was launching his weekly gig on a Washington D.C. jock radio show unfortunately called The Sports Junkies. And he seriously seemed to think he was offered a seat on that panel to discuss football.

This is a man who has never matured beyond dope-fumed giggles in his parents’ garage and the authority-defying escapades of adolescence.

There’s no shame in his vocabulary and no off-switch in his antics.

“I’ve got nothing left to hide,” Ford prevaricated what seems like a lifetime ago now but was only last month, at the press conference where he finally admitted to smoking crack cocaine — just the once, probably in a drunken stupor that he couldn’t even recall.

Yet those wiretap transcripts released by the courts Wednesday strongly indicate not only that Ford may have used drugs on multiple occasions as mayor but also, crucially, that he was well-aware of the disputed video’s existence — the evidence he’d insisted didn’t exist because the incident never happened — and had allegedly directed attempts to retrieve it, dangling $5,000 and a car for the transaction. Meanwhile, Ford’s cellphone — either stolen or lost whilst he was “smoking his rocks” at an Etobicoke crack house, according to intercepted conversations between gang riff-raff — was purportedly lassoed back by Lisi in exchange for a pound and a half of marijuana.

Lisi, with two prior criminal convictions, is left holding the bag on a serious extortion charge, allegedly devolving from his close friendship with and fealty to the mayor.